"The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history.... It was written in Magna Carta." — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941, inaugural address.

This year, 2015, you may hear a lot about Magna Carta, one of the most important documents in the history of democracy.

Eight-hundred years ago, in the meadow at Runnymede, England, on the 15th of June 1215, King John of England was compelled by a group of 40 rebellious barons and their supporters, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, to accept as binding a document limiting his powers and ensuring certain rights for freemen and barons of England. The barons had become infuriated by John's military incompetence against France and his heavy-handed taxation policies.

Magna Carta forms a historical foundation for numerous legal customs taken for granted in many nations, especially in the West, including habeas corpus, the right to a trial, as mentioned in one of the most famous passages of Magna Carta, one also containing the enduring phrase "the Law of the Land":

No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land.

Twenty-five of the barons, who came to be known as the Magna Carta Sureities, witnessed in the king's presence at Runnymede the affixing of the Great Seal of England onto the document.

The charter was meant to forestall civil war. It didn't work. Neither the king nor the barons honored the document's commitments. This led to the First Barons' War.

The charter evolved over time, not being referred to as Magna Carta until 1217, the year in which the First Barons' War ended, and not formally becoming statutory law until 1297 under Edward I.

King John was the youngest son of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Today, he's perhaps most famous as a villainous character in various tales about Robin Hood. (In the film The Lion In Winter, he's portrayed as a petulant semi-dolt.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is credited with the first draft of the charter. He was a formidable figure, managing to feud with both King John and then Pope Innocent III. Langton is also thought to have divided the Bible into the standard arrangement of chapters still adhered to today.

Photo: Salisbury Cathedral's copy of Magna Carta, one of only four surviving 1215 exemplifications. (Getty Images)

I think Scotland will vote Yes for independence. I will be disappointed by what that means for The Labour Party and my friends in Labour, but I will want to see an independent Scotland succeed as thoroughly and quickly as possible, for the Yes campaign's vision is a progressive and reformist one.

An independent Scotland's success would be a repudiation of the Conservatives. The country of Adam Smith has no great love for neo-liberalism. The rhetoric of the Scottish National Party (SNP) has been to downplay the nationalism aspect. There's no real anti-English aspect to the Yes campaign except for some extremists on the fringes trapped in the very distant past. Plenty of Scots who are voting Yes would explain to you that by doing so they are not suggesting for a minute that the UK was a bad idea in 1707 or even in 1957. Protestantism, Empire, Industry, and then the Social Welfare State were ties that bound surprisingly firmly. (See Ian Jack's excellent commentary in The Guardian, "Is This the End of Britishness?") But those ties have all come undone—not completely, but quite a bit so. Alex Salmond has even said the referendum isn't really about independence per se but about what's the best mechanism for a fairer society within Scotland.

The vision the SNP has put forward is for a Scotland that is decidedly more liberal (in the American sense of the word—socialist, really) than the rest of the UK is now, and if political mechanisms existed within the UK's system by which Scotland could move in more leftward directions in actual governance, the independence referendum would have never picked up steam.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron refused to let a third option be on the referendum ballot, an option for further devolution of power to Scotland's parliament (some call the option "devo max" or "independence light"), even though Alex Salmond requested it, and polls at the time showed it was the first choice option for most Scots.

David Cameron may within 24 hours from now be regretting that as the biggest mistake of his career.

The above graphic (click to view it full size in a pop-up window) from The Economist shows pretty well why the Scottish feel politically alienated. The question is: is independence the best solution given the risks of independence, the benefits of the union such as a shared currency, pooled resources and open borders, and the symbolic value of union—the UK as a whole greater than the sum of its different countries....a progressive concept in 1707 when it was created, and through which a tremendous amount has been accomplished by Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland (after 1922 Northern Ireland) working together.

The larger question though is whether or not the vision being offered by the SNP, however much I like it—though I'd prefer it be achieved through the mechanisms of the UK that would require more patience and compromise, to be sure—is a vision that is realistic and possible. A friend on Facebook spelled out the dangers as clearly as anyone I've read in the UK media:

Scotland probably can't afford the kind of social democratic state Scotland wants. Their subsidy from the south can be made up, or even exceeded, by oil and gas revenues. However, as those revenues are highly variable, and will make up a far higher percentage of Scotland's budget than they do UK's, it will be tricky. But they still won't have the money for everything they want to do, and the oil and gas will eventually run out. Raising taxes is risky; if anything, copying Ireland's strategy of lowering them to be more competitive would make more sense. And it's certain that some financial companies will move significant operations south, cutting tax receipts further. Unless and until they can develop new industries, they'll face significant fiscal limitations. Especially as the UK has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world, and Scotland will take on it share. But without the British Treasury's credit history, it won't be able to borrow as easily or at such low rates. They will be boxed in, yet Salmond will feel obliged to deliver on at least some of his promises fairly quickly. If that's followed by economic problems with the transition, or a more general downturn, or both, they could get into trouble relatively fast.

An independent Scotland may, in fact, raise taxes markedly and quickly. Small nations with high taxes can be very successful. Look at Denmark. It has a 60% income tax and the tax on a new car is around 225%. The nation is wealthy and happy. Of course, it is also fully integrated into the EU, which is something that would take Scotland about 5 years to achieve, it is estimated, assuming nations like Spain—that have their own separatist issues to deal with—will even permit Scotland to enter the EU. On the other hand, nations like Iceland have been very successful without being in the EU so long as they enter into other treaties and agreements allowing freer trade, more open borders, and so forth.

Is Alex Salmand's Obama-esque message of Hope and Change a pipe dream? Perhaps. Probably not entirely. Is it realistic? Probably not, but probably not entirely unsound, either. Like the Obama campaign, the Yes campaign has many different elements of a society seeing the same campaign in slightly different ways; elements that might actually become a broken coalition if independence is won. (It is interesting that the Greens support an independent Scotland when so much of the independence vision rests on the Scottish North Sea oil regime.) Within two years of President Obama's election, the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives in a sweeping backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement. Many, a minority, of those who voted for President Obama wish they had not, or so they claim. Alex Salmond speaks of "Team Scotland" that will work together beginning September the 19th. We shall see. The possibility exists that the referendum will have stirred up divisions that have yet to become recognized widely, not just divisions between Scotland and the "rump UK" ("rUK"), especially England, but divisions within Scotland itself. If that occurs, then the true measure of Salmond's political skills will be taken, based on his ability keep the new nation smoothly governable.

On Thursday, the 18th of September, any Scot who is at least 16 years old and registered to vote can cast his or her answer to a single, simple Yes/No ballot question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?"

If the Yes vote wins, Scotland will undergo a fast-track process of separation from the rest of the UK (England, Wales, Northern Ireland); it would officially wrap up in 2016, at which time the name Great Britain would cease to be an occasional political notion and revert to being a strictly geographical one.

Robert Graves' famous 1929 autobiography Good-Bye to All That considered not only the passing of Britain's old political order in the wake of the First World War, but how people's very way of life profoundly changed. If the UK ends, the break-up will not be a sterile act of officialdom with things carrying on much as they had. It will be another big good-bye with ramifications that are impossible to fully anticipate.

More than 700,000 Scottish citizens live in England (including many soldiers training under the same flag with their UK comrades), about 13% of all Scots. One frequently encounters Scots in English cities (as well as the Irish, it might be noted). Scots and the English marry each other without a sense of the marriage being one between foreigners. The English go to Scottish universities, as Prince William did, and vice versa as easily if not more easily than Americans raised in one state attend university in another state. So, to my mind, it is an odd concept that the Scottish and English should suddenly become officially foreigners to one another—carrying different passports, subject to different capitals' policies—due to at most about 2,000,000 Scots voting on the fate of the 65,000,000-person United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

But that may very well be what happens. Soon.

Many important events led up to the creation of the UK. One is the Union of the Crowns on March 25,1603, when following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, King James of Scotland became King of England, too. It wasn't until 1707 with the Acts of Union that Scotland and England joined officially—becoming the United Kingdom through an admittedly inelegant political marriage. The Acts' Article 15 granted about £400,000 to Scotland in what could be considered an indirect bailout of Scottish businessmen who'd suffered from the collapse of the Darien scheme to found a colony in Panama; though it's a gross over-simplification to say that the Darien affair triggered union. Some in Scotland and England had been pushing for union for a century already by the time of Darien.

But union was greeted not so much by celebrations in the streets as by protests (mostly in Scotland), shrugged shoulders, vague hopes, measured relief, and pretty much every other kind of reaction except great excitement. No revolution had been fought, no great battle won. It was an arrangement agreed among elites with the average Scotsman, Englishman, Welshman, and Irishman having no say.

But it proved a remarkable and remarkably resilient thing, and for good reasons.

As effective unions tend to do, the United Kingdom created a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The union over time amplified that which it facilitated in the first place: combined energies, shared resources, and exchanged knowledge and opinion within Britain that then significantly affected the rest of the world through

*the Industrial Revolution;*the abolition of the slave trade and a naval system for disrupting it on the high seas;*the British Empire with its very checkered and highly controversial past, an empire that while being an exploitative and rankly extractive system also spread to an extent far disproportionate to the UK's small population medical, industrial, transport, and communications advances as well as parliamentary democracy, literacy, education, and concepts of individualism and free trade all around the planet;*profound medical and scientific discoveries—the UK's talent, institutions, funding, or combination helped bring about such things as John Snow's and The Rev'd Henry Whitehead's debasement of the miasma theory of disease during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, Charles Darwin's discovery of Evolution by National Selection, Bletchley Park's and Alan Turing's pioneering work in computing, James Watson's, Francis Crick's, and Rosalind Franklin's discoveries of the nature of DNA, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web;*important and basically stand-alone resistance to the Nazis at a crucial moment in history;*the social democratic state of the post-World War II era, including the National Health Service (NHS);*the strength of the pound sterling currency over the course of generations, and*even still today, in Britain's post-imperial era, and the sixth-largest economy in the world (possibly the fourth-largest in 20 years' time) and the fifth-wealthiest per capita, though, like in the U.S.A., an economy saddled with increasingly problematic inequality in wealth distribution.

There have been many moments marking a further slight unraveling of the United Kingdom in the last several decades. One is probably the rise of Margaret Thatcher who infamously remarked that "there is no such thing as society". Not exactly a statement of unity. Thatcher's policies gutted Scottish industries and helped bring about the dominance of London's modern financial sector after first greatly weakening the trade unions of Britain, which were admittedly recklessly grinding the UK's economy to a halt and politically overreaching.

For some Yes voters in Scotland on Thursday, their Yes vote will be a direct retort to Thatcher. "You want go-it-alone-ism, Mrs. Thatcher? Okay, we'll take you at your word. Here we go!" Many Scots feel they have less in common with the English politically and economically than ever before in modern times.

Interestingly, while in the modern era the Conservatives among the three major UK political parties probably evoke union and Britishness the most, they may have the most to gain purely electorally if Scotland secedes. The Labour Party would lose a large number of voters since a large majority of Scottish voters in the UK prefer Labour to the Tories, though many of them vote for candidates of the SNP, the Scottish National Party.

But more moderate Conservatives, such as Prime Minister David Cameron and London's mayor Boris Johnson, certainly find no comfort in that. English political conservatism's right flank has grown in power quite suddenly in recent years, reflecting trends on the continent, too. More mainstream Conservatives worry that a "rump UK" that lacks Scotland and with primarily English voters could pull their party even farther rightward, alienating Welsh voters, bringing about harshly nativist anti-immigration policies, and even occasioning an exit from the European Union, membership in which is more strongly supported in Scotland than in England.

I will note a different moment of unraveling that is minor but tied to a personal reminiscence. That moment is the death of John Smith QCMP, the leader of the British Labour Party from July 1992 to May 1994, and who would have turned 76 years old on September 13, 2014. Like other leaders of the Labour Party, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown after him, Smith was Scottish. Unlike Blair and Brown, he was never Prime Minister.

As Leader of the Opposition when the Conservatives were in power and John Major was Prime Minister, Smith—and his Labour colleague Donald Dewar, who some consider the father of the modern nation of Scotland—committed Labour to supporting the idea of devolving control of certain Scottish affairs from Westminster to a Scottish parliament.

But what's more noteworthy about Smith, I think, is that even though he was a relative moderate and also supported devolution, he was nonetheless the last leader of the Labour Party to represent the sort of unapologetic Labour ideals that a majority of Scots have long preferred in contrast to the more Tory-friendly English. After Smith, Tony Blair became the leader of Labour, and the party moved rightward, becoming decidedly more centrist.

It was one thing for Scotland to feel alienated by the Conservatives' policies and the likes of "that woman", which is how some older Brits I know still refer to Margaret Thatcher. It was quite another for Scotland to be disappointed by a rightward shift by the Labour Party, the very party for which so many Scottish voters had formed part of the bedrock. This might be why, according to recent polls, the Yes campaign has in recent days gained ground largely through a last-minute surge of Labour voters deciding to vote Yes.

The case for Yes is based on the firm belief that the best people to take decisions about Scotland are the people who live and work here.

No one else will do a better job and no one else cares as much about our country.

So we need to take this sense of empowerment forward and ensure we make the most of all the talents of everyone who lives in Scotland.

Surely it’s time to say goodbye to the days when decisions about our lives were made by remote Westminster governments – often, like now, Tory-led governments that we didn’t even elect.

When the Tory PM jetted up to Scotland for a day-trip on Wednesday he said he would be heartbroken if we voted Yes.

Westminster politicians talk about “losing Scotland” as if we were some sort of possession.

But it isn’t Mr Cameron’s heartbreak at losing his right to govern Scotland I’m bothered about. It’s the heartbreak of the parents having to bring their children up in poverty because of the Tory Party’s policies that should concern us.

more of my fellow Scots need to realise that....[w]hat lies ahead if they do this is economic chaos and years of disastrous disruption during which the English, who the Scots so often misread and underestimate, will be very hard-headed in defence of their interests......At stake is a wonderful Union with a successful single market and a shared heritage of artistic, scientific, diplomatic, humanitarian and military endeavour. If all that is lost—sacrificed for a lie and replaced with bitterness and resentment—it will be a historical tragedy of epic proportions.

Chris Deerin, a Scot who moved back to Stirling after a decade in London, and who supports a continued union, writes in The Guardian that the union allows Scots

to plug ourselves into a vast network, to be citizens of a globally minded country that has always based much of its military, intellectual and economic success on Scots and their genius......Scotland and England buried centuries of enmity to form a union......Our civic space is a place of furious arguments, terrible temper tantrums, expressions of disgust and awful accusations—and then we resolve our differences peacefully, make a decision and move on......I hope to be in a position to tell [my daughters] that when the moment arrived, Scots—Scots, of all people!—did not opt to go small....

Major Labour Party figure John Reid, a Scot and also former Home Secretary of the UK, took aim directly at the SNP in the Daily Record and Sunday Mail writing:

And, as we approach next Thursday’s vote, we should remember [progressive accomplishments] provided by Labour Governments—British Labour Governments. By men and women from throughout the UK. Not one of them owes anything to Nationalism or the SNP.

In fact, those Governments were opposed tooth and nail by the nationalists for the past 70 years.

When the Labour Government of the 1940s was establishing the Welfare state, the nationalists were campaigning for Separation.

When the labour Government of the 1960s was expanding educational opportunity for working class boys and girls, the nationalists were campaigning on Separatism.

When the Labour Government of the 1970’s was introducing the Race Relations Act, the nationalists preferred separatism. So much so that when asked to choose between that Labour Government and the Tory Opposition led by Thatcher, they walked into the lobbies to vote with the Tories, bringing down the Labour Government and leading to 18 years of Thatcherism.

And remember – it was Alex Salmond who said that Scotland ‘didn’t mind’ Thatcher’s economics. Well I’m sorry Alex – we did. You can start with the workers at Linwood and Ravenscraig but really we more than minded the devastation Thatcher’s economics caused.

In the 1990’s, the same story. When the last Labour Government introduced the minimum wage, the SNP couldn’t even be bothered to turn up to vote for it. They were more interested in their sole aim, separation from the UK. Just as last week, a majority of their MPs couldn’t be bothered to turn up to vote to join with Labour in defeating the Tories over the Bedroom Tax.

In 1993, while serving as a Research Assistant to Labour MP Martin O'Neill, Chairman of the Trade and Industry Select Committee and a Scot, I met John Smith once and only in passing—a mere handshake at the security gate outside of Norman Shaw North, the New (old) Scotland Yard building then given over to parliamentary offices. He was alone, glasses slipping towards the end of his nose, a bundle of papers under one arm, walking towards the street. In stereotypically overly-forward American fashion, I asked him if I could shake his hand. I introduced myself, saying it was an honor to meet him. He obliged me and returned my greeting happily while I said something stupid probably along the lines of "Keep up the good work."

Smith died suddenly of a heart attack in 1994. He's buried on Iona, a small Scottish island famous in British and medieval Christian history.

On Thursday, the Scots might vote No. I think Smith would want them to. A Scotsman, yes, Smith no doubt understood the ways that Scotland and England both benefited from the union. In the UK, the UK itself is very often (rather too often) accurately described as "punching above its weight". It's not unlike the concept in the United States of e pluribus unum, our nation's first motto, the motto chosen for the republic by its founders. It is Latin for "out of many, one"—akin to the notion of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. There is worth in that, and I think it is something that Smith would not want Scotland to jettison.

But even if Scotland votes No, the UK will never be the same. I suspect that if the No campaign wins, it will more than likely delay Scottish independence for only a few years. Several commentators have noted this, including The Guardian's Owen Jones. (I don't like all aspects of his proposed remedy, however.)

During one of the most remarkable Prime Minister's Questions in my lifetime, on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, Leader of the House William Hague lead an all-party plea in the House of Common for continued union as speaker after speaker stood to urge Scotland to not leave the union.

Hague led Questions because Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as the leaders of The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, were in Scotland in a last-ditch effort to encourage the No vote, a very risky move since all three men are very unpopular in Scotland.

As I've been saying since January, I think the Yes vote will win by a very narrow margin. While Alex Salmond knows his audience well and the Yes campaign has expertly created a stalwart, inspiring narrative and echo chamber promoting Scottish independence—albeit a narrative I feel is at times starry-eyed as well as disingenuous—the pro-UK campaign has remained comparatively fragmented and unenthusiastic, even timid.

My opinion now is further fueled by a highly speculative notion that of the hundreds of thousands of Scots not resident in Scotland and who have already voted by mail, some small percentage of them probably voted Yes as a form of what they thought would be a non-consequential protest vote, because until just days ago, including when early voting began, the No campaign (motto, "Better Together") led in the polls.

That small number of Yes-But-Not-Really early voters, who if voting today would vote No in light of the surge of support for independence, might end up being the margin of victory for the separatists. It's proved in political science that some voters will vote rather recklessly when they think their vote won't matter. Consider the American voters in Florida who in 2000 admitted to pollsters after the presidential election that they'd never have voted for third-party candidate Ralph Nadar if they'd known that their vote would help elect George W. Bush by denying Vice-President Al Gore badly needed votes in one of the closest elections in US history.

We'll see.

I will love Scotland and the Scottish whatever they decide on Thursday. But I say, "Better together!" The United Kingdom has not outlived its usefulness yet, I believe, for Scotland or the world.

The UpStairs Lounge arson of June 24, 1973, was the deadliest fire in New Orleans history and the largest massacre of gay people ever in the U.S. Yet it didn’t make much of an impact news-wise. The few respectable news organizations that deigned to cover the tragedy made little of the fact that the majority of the victims had been gay, while talk-radio hosts tended to take a jocular or sneering tone: What do we bury them in? Fruit jars, sniggered one, on the air, only a day after the massacre.

Jewish, Welsh, gay-rights champion, abortion opponent, socialist, attorney, Member of Parliament, and author, Leo Abse, is one of the more extraordinary late 20th-century politicians who you've likely never heard of.

In the 1960's, he led the parliamentary effort to decriminalize homosexuality in Britain, helped liberalize divorce law to allow women to divorce for reasons other than adultery, supported nuclear disarmament, and--quite famously so at the time--dressed in flamboyant, tailored suits on Budget Day--the day each year when the Chancellor of the Exchequer presents the Government's budget to the House of Commons.

Additionally,

Abse was the first MP to initiate debates on genetic engineering, the dangers of nuclear power generation at Windcsale, and in vitro pregnacies; and he campaigned to change the law which made attempted suicide a criminal act. (The Telegraph)

A champion of Jewish and Welsh causes, he was not beyond criticizing Israeli military excesses and nonetheless opposed Welsh devolution. Though a social reformer and secular, he held a pro-life/anti-choice stance based in large part upon personal conviction relating to his handicapped son.

He was short, of slight frame, fast-speaking, and sported a pompadour hair style.

Besides his political and legal work, Abse also authored various books looking at political or cultural figures or topics from a psychoanalytical perspective, including his 1997 book, Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love--an attention-getting title if there ever was one. (While lauding his reformist views on gay rights, many social progressives today would find highly problematic Abse's Freudian-based views on homosexuality's causes; however, such views were much more common decades ago, even among liberal social reformers.)

The founder of the Cardiff-based solicitors firm Leo Abse & Cohen, Abse later in life played a key role in solicitors being granted access to the High Court, access previously reserved for barristers only. (In the UK, the legal profession is split between two types of lawyers: solicitors and barristers.)

Abse served in North Africa during World War Two until he was recalled from Cairo in 1944 stemming from his activities surrounding a "Forces Parliament" that had been set up by RAF servicemen to debate the kind of post-war British society they desired.

In the end, controversy entered his personal life, too, when four years after his wife of 40 years died in 2000, Abse, then 83 years old, married a Polish woman 50 years his junior, and upon his death in 2008, in accordance with his will, she received £1 million while his two children received only a few items and no money.

Abse had far more noted influence on UK law than the vast majority of backbenchers usually enjoy in their careers.

"Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen." - The Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Episcopal Church.

A radical definition of family for a radical definition of sacrifice.

An atheist friend of mine always attends Good Friday services at his local Episcopal Church, the one time each year he crosses the threshold of a house of worship. Once, I asked him why. "Because the f---ing bastards killed Christ." The resurrection he rejects in its literal sense. But, there is for him still the crucifixion, which he recognizes as a distressingly human event, deeply political, and very significant: the horror of betrayal, the abuse of might against right, the exploitation of the mob by cynical figures of authority, the baying for blood, the rejection of meekness, the will to maintain order and the status quo rising up against a new order offered by an unlooked-for messenger; but also the process of positive change through sacrifice, the despair that may later be revealed as a beginning of a new dispensation, if not a metaphysical dispensation then a new way of doing things, a new way of being. Jesus came onto the scene and many people of power felt threatened enough to cause far greater offense in return. There is violence in the story. It is not for the faint of heart.

The vitriol that has fueled U.S. culture wars for so long is now being exported, and some of our most ardent culture warriors are finding a far more receptive audience abroad.

In nations such as Uganda, Russia, Nigeria and Belize, an insidious homophobia engineered in America is taking root. I have seen this hate being spread with my own eyes.

In March 2009, while in Kampala, Uganda, researching reports of U.S. right-wing evangelical involvement in attacks on LGBTQ equality and reproductive justice, I was invited to a three-day conference on homosexuality hosted by the Family Life Network, which is based in New York. The keynote speaker was Scott Lively from Springfield, Mass., who introduced himself as a leading expert on the "international homosexual agenda." I filmed Lively over the course of two days as he instructed religious and political leaders about how gays were coming to Uganda from the West to "recruit children into homosexuality."

From "Going the Distance," David Remnick's interview and article with President Barack Obama, The New Yorker, January 27, 2014:

“One of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate more as President is you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history,” [President Obama] later told me. “You don’t start with a clean slate, and the things you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable. But you can move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant. I suspect that Ronald Reagan, if you’d asked him, would not have considered the earned-income-tax-credit provision in tax reform to be at the top of his list of accomplishments. On the other hand, what the E.I.T.C. has done, starting with him, being added to by Clinton, being used by me during the Recovery Act, has probably kept more people out of poverty than a whole lot of other government programs that are currently in place."

.....

"I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

One-hundred-fifty years ago today, July 3rd, at 2 p.m., during the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge occurred and the high-water mark of the Confederacy was reached less than an hour later when the bloody charge was repulsed. In light of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act, it’s remarkable how some of the issues that emerged at our republic's founding still linger so long.

Photo (click to enlarge): The area of the Cemetery Hill portion of the Gettysburg Battlefield where the Confederate forces' point of farthest advance was reached, just to the east (left) of the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Monument of the soldier swinging his rifle.

Photo (click to enlarge): The view from where stood the Union army's line atop Cemetery Hill, looking west toward Seminary Ridge (the trees in the far distance) from where Pickett's Charge was launched. The reconstructed fence along the Emmitsburg Road is visible in the middle distance. The advancing Confederates were under Union artillery fire the entire way and from approximately the fence line on they were also within range of Union rifle fire. Many Confederate soldiers died while crawling over the fence or regrouping once over it; many others--the exact number can only be guess at--simply refused to advance beyond the fence and turned back.